The Birds

By Jacqueline Herner

April 21, 2001

Alfred Hitchcock’s films Psycho and The Birds are both stories about a son and his mother. Psycho was made in 1959 with The Birds immediately following in 1962. Hitchcock spent the intervening three years meticulously preparing for the filming of The Birds. As was his custom, he worked out every detail on the storyboard. Much more than any other director, perhaps, what you see in his film is what he wants you to see. Everything is deliberately placed, including the actors. He makes great use of symbolism and it is through this that his films reveal their meaningfulness. Nowhere is this more true than in two of his greatest films, Psycho and The Birds.

In these movies we are invited into the fantasy world of Alfred Hitchcock, as he points out by making a brief appearance in each film. It is a Kleinian world of early relationships gone wrong, full of splitting, projection and introjection, good objects and bad objects, good self and bad self, persecutory anxiety and erotic longings. It is an inner world filled with compulsions to dominate and destroy, which pivots around the issue of recognition and separation between objects.

In both, there are seemingly two women involved - a mother and a sexually exciting woman. This woman threatens to break into the unity of son and mother; to demand recognition as an other. With her advent comes an experience of fragmentation and vicious retaliation. Attack comes unexpectedly, striking where one is most vulnerable, in moments of privacy and intimacy, and in the world of everyday. It comes in the shower, at a child’s party, in the living room and at the school ground.

Winnicott speaks of a stage in life when the child conceives of his mother as actually two mothers - the environment mother who holds and protects and the object-mother who excites passionate feelings. It is the task of the object-mother to survive attack and destruction. In Psycho and The Birds we find a vivid portrayal of the struggle to integrate the two aspects of mother. In Psycho the object-mother does not survive and Norman becomes the pre-oedipal mother from whom there is no separation.

Psycho was filmed in black and white in an era when most films were shot in colour. This is our first clue that there is a splitting of personalities occurring. We are inexorably drawn into Norman’s internal world of early object relations, before there has been a separating out from mother and a recognition of her as an entity in her own right. Here there is both desire and aggression, enmeshment and isolation. Norman tells Marian: “We are all in our private traps. Clamped in them and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw but only at the air, only at each other and for all of it we never budge an inch.”

Norman lives in an illusion of omnipotence. For a young child this is, as Winnicott says, a necessary illusion. But Norman is now an adult and cannot venture beyond this early world. As he says, “I was born in (my trap)”. To differentiate himself from his mother brings overwhelming anxiety. At the prospect of such a separation, he kills his mother and her lover and keeps her stuffed body with him. No one is to break the bond, not even mother herself. She is now “stuffed” with his split-off feelings and lives on inside of him. 

Norman is attracted to and repelled by Marian, for she excites forbidden feelings and brings the possibility of otherness, of relationship with all of its unpredictability and loss of control; her existence threatens to overwhelm him with fears and anxieties and unleashes in him an impulse to destroy.

I believe it is these feelings, associated with the traps and pitfalls of disrupted attachment, that Hitchcock represents with bird imagery. Psycho is filled with references to birds. Marian’s last name is Crane. She leaves Phoenix in search of a new beginning. Her motel room wall bears two pictures of feral-looking birds. After an apparent argument with his mother about what he wants with Marian, Norman brings Marian some supper. They sit in his parlour, overshadowed by predatory stuffed birds, and have the following conversation.

Film clip from Psycho (“You eat like a bird”............ A boy’s best friend is his mother.”)

Norman’s comment to Marian - “you eat like a bird” - reveals that Marian arouses in him strong feelings. But “birds eat quite a lot”. They are consuming creatures.

Norman’s hobby is “stuffing things”, mainly birds because they are “passive”. He needs to project his own meanings into another and cannot allow a separate existence. And “bird” is a slang term for a woman - not just any woman but a woman one would like to “stuff” - a slang term for sexual intercourse. Passivity seems to be important - they won’t retaliate. Norman doesn’t like to stuff beasts - presumably anyone who would be assertive and wild. He doesn’t like the look of them. And he doesn’t like to stuff dogs and cats. Perhaps they are too affectionately and intimately connected. Compare this to what Mitch tells Melanie in the bird shop when he describes the kind of love birds he is looking for. Norman reveals himself to be an isolated and immature youth who is close to his mother - just how close we have yet to discover. As he tells Marian, he doesn’t need companions because “a boy’s best friend is his mother.”

But within Norman, the seemingly passive birds take on a life of their own. As the introjected mother, Norman kills Marian. The knife is a stabbing beak, the shrill violins the shrieking cry of a predatory bird. When he discovers his “mother’s” deed and comes upon Marian’s body lying on the bathroom floor, one of the bird pictures falls from the wall.

The introjected environment-mother carries the fear of abandonment, the jealousy and the rage at anyone who would disrupt her bond with her son (as does Lydia in The Birds). It is she who destroys Marian as object-mother to preserve her oneness with her son.

The Birds continues the dialogue begun in Psycho, but looked at from a different perspective. One could say that Psycho deals with introjection  while The Birds deals with projection. While Psycho reveals to us the struggle that exists within Norman Bates, The Birds stretches towards a possible outcome of the struggle.

Donald Spoto, Hitchcock biographer and film critic, calls The Birds “Hitchcock’s least accessible film, for it reveals its richness like a demanding art novel or a complex symphony, only after considerable effort”. Or as Annie the schoolteacher puts it, the town of Bodega Bay and its inhabitants “doesn’t offer much to the casual visitor”.

Spoto calls The Birds “......one of the purest, most darkly lyrical films ever created.”.....”a tragic poem whose episodes are like stanzas emotionally reinforcing a single theme”. The stanzas Spoto refers to are the emotionally charged exchanges that take place between the characters of the movie concerning relationship, abandonment and separation. The bird attacks follow immediately after these exchanges.

As emotions intensify, so do the bird attacks. From the seemingly innocent search for a pair of love birds, to the final overwhelming assault on Melanie in the attic, the relationships between the characters deepen and lose their superficial quality. After Melanie speaks to Mitch of her feelings about her mother, the birds attack the children who are attending Cathy’s party, playing a game of “Blindman’s Bluff”.

Film clip (“You need a mother’s care, my child”.....bird attack at party.)

Like Norman’s mother, Melanie’s mother took up with “a hotel man” and abandoned her child. It is the children who suffer. Melanie is identified as one of the children both by Mitch’s statement “You need a mother’s care, my child” and her own “I guess I’ll go and join the other children”.

In The Birds the characters repeatedly use the words “I see” or “you see”. Attachments blind us. We lose our ability to see. The children play “Blindman’s Bluff”, a farmer has his eyes pecked out. A school girl’s glasses lie shattered on the ground as she flees.

No longer dormant as they are in Psycho, the birds here are alive and flocking together to attack. Persecutory anxiety has taken over and “The world is coming to an end”, as the drunk at the restaurant says. This time it is a projected mother who destroys. Mother Nature herself has run amok. Melanie’s attack in the attic echoes the attack on Marian in Psycho. Marian does not survive the attack and neither does mother except as an introjected object. But Melanie and Lydia do survive the attacks and the close of the film holds a glimmer of hope, as Lydia and Melanie are reconciled and the love birds are carried with them on their journey by the child, Cathy. “After all, they haven’t hurt anybody”, she says as they slowly drive into an uncertain future full of roadblocks amidst the temporarily calmed but waiting birds.